


The Color I See

by AngelicGrace



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, Captain America: The First Avenger, M/M, Mutual Pining, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Slash, Swearing, dialogue blatantly stolen from multiple movies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-03-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 15:54:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6201520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelicGrace/pseuds/AngelicGrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>also known as the painfully cliché (poetic?) soulmate au no one asked for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Color I See

**Author's Note:**

> if you take the time to read this, it would be absolutely amazing if you could comment with any constructive criticism, etc. I know my writing is far from perfect, but I would love if you could tell me what to work on. A couple compliments wouldn't go amiss either (if you feel like i deserve them)! Thank you, darlings <3

Steve’s mother used to describe to him what it was like meeting her soulmate for the first time.

 **(** She met Steve’s father at a flower shop. Their eyes made contact the way it happens in the movies, romantic and intimate, and he grinned shyly at her. She still remembers that smile vividly. He beamed with his whole face, the corners of his eyes crinkling and his cheeks pressing themselves into crisp dimples. And she knew right then that he was the one for her (as cliché as it sounded) because her black-and-white world lit up into glorious colors. She could see the rainbows of the flowers in the shop and his pink lips and the dark purple circles under his eyes. They fell in love quickly, and life was perfect. Until the day he marched into battle and didn’t come back. She felt it, the moment he died. Her world flickered, and then everything was in shades of gray again. She cried for days. The colors had been her evidence that she loved him, that she knew him. And just like him, they were gone. She doesn’t tell Steve about that part. There are some things that she thinks he is too young to know. Heartbreak is one of them. **)**

Steve likes to daydream about his soulmate. Will she be beautiful? Will they meet on a street, in a garden, or his school? Will he even have one? Some people don’t, he knows that. He pities them. They’re the cursed children, doomed to live alone in black and white and shadows (Steve has never seen color, but he craves it). And he’s heard whispers, of heartbroken dames who fall in love with men who only see color because of another. And oh lord, he fears that too, seeing someone’s colors when they only see him in shades of white and grey. 

Steve doesn’t get a romantic first meeting. The first color he sees is brown (the boy’s hair, glossy with sweat). He’s ready to snap at the boy for offering him help (though he needs it), for daring to think that he can’t take care of himself, but the words lodge in his throat when he sees the earnestness in the boy’s blue eyes. One glance is all it takes. Steve Rogers falls in love with the color blue at fourteen (it takes him longer to fall in love with Bucky Barnes).

 

+++++

 

Bucky is fourteen when he gets into his first fight. He briefly registers a large teenager punching a smaller boy who doesn’t seem to want to stay down. Bucky doesn’t give the tiny figure a second glance, preferring to punch the bigger boy in front of him. He grins as the boy’s satisfied expression contorts into surprise, then pain, etched in shades of grey on his fat face. The boy runs away, and Bucky remembers the skinny kid crumpled on the ground in front of him.

The first color he sees is red (blood dripping from the boy’s nose), then the golden blond of his hair. Bucky Barnes isn’t like Steve Rogers. He falls hard, and he falls fast for a pale, bony boy with hair like the summer sun and eyes with the depth of the summer sky. He doesn’t tell a soul. As far as everyone else is concerned, James Buchanan Barnes lives a colorless life, and he’s okay with that (maybe he’s not, but he doesn’t tell anyone about that either).

 

+++++

 

Steve is seventeen when he realizes he’s in love with his best friend (although, now that he’s brave enough to acknowledge it, he thinks that maybe he was all along). He doesn’t talk about it. In this time and place, people don’t take kindly to boys who fall in love with other boys (soulmates or not).

But Sarah Rogers knows. She’s a mother, after all, and she can see the way Steve steals glances at his best friend as they bump shoulders, running up and down the Brooklyn streets. She also sees how Bucky looks at him, but she doesn’t mention it. She figures that if her boys haven’t already figured it out, they will soon. She has enough faith in them for that (but they’re idiots, maybe she shouldn’t be so sure).

So Steve-and-Bucky, the single entity that the whole neighborhood knows so well, floats through life peacefully, subtly staring at the back of each other’s heads when they could just turn around and let their eyes meet.

 

+++++

 

Sarah falls ill after taking care of one too many tuberculosis-infected patients. Her rosy skin becomes waxy, clinging to her bones. Her cheeks become sunken and haunted, and Steve begins to see his mother, once so full of life (playing with him as a boy, working so goddamn hard for him to have a good life, doing the work of two parents because she had no other choice), wasting away before his eyes. He wants to take on extra jobs, but times are hard, and no right-minded employer wants to give a job to him.

“Why would they?” he asks Bucky. “One fella called me a disease-ridden, weak excuse for a human being.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t punch him then and there, pal.” Bucky grins humorlessly, slugging his best friend in the arm.

Steve grins. “Oh, I did. Got a fine beating for it too.”

“Dammit, Stevie.”

But Bucky helps out when he can, showing up at their door with cans of food and hot bowls of soup. “From my Ma.” He says. He fails to inform Steve that he’s taken up extra shifts at the docks, working until the early hours of the morning in the hope of getting Sarah some medicine. But Steve can see the purple circles under his eyes and his tired smiles. So he invites his best friend in, not noticing the extra bills and coins Bucky leaves on the counter when he finally has to leave for work again. But Sarah isn’t getting any better, no matter what her boys do. Both Steve and Bucky’s faces become tired, although they smile for her and do everything they can to keep her comfortable. When Steve is out, one day, she calls Bucky to her side.

“I’m not getting any better, sweetheart. You boys need to let me go.”

“We’re doing everything we can. You’ll be okay—” he tries to interrupt.

She shakes her head. “I’m a nurse. I know I’m dying, James. Don’t lie to me.”

Bucky’s face pinches up, and he blinks frantically, eyes red.

“The colors. You see them, don’t you?” Sarah strokes his cheek and he nods, biting his lip. “Take care of Stevie. When I’m gone, he’s gonna push you away, and he’s gonna be screaming on the inside and not saying a damn thing aloud.”

Bucky closes his eyes, before looking back at her.

Her eyes are soft, gentle. “You know him,” she continues, “Sometimes better than I do. Promise me you’ll stay with him, James Buchanan Barnes.”

“You didn’t need to ask.” His voice wobbles, and he kisses her fever-flushed cheek. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And three weeks later, after Sarah Rogers passes away in her sleep, Bucky is there. He is there when Steve is crying, feeling her cold neck for a pulse and begging her to wake up. He is there when the anger comes, and his best friend’s knuckles are bloody from punching concrete walls and bony jaws. He is there at Steve’s door after the funeral, offering to stay.

“Thank you, Buck. But I can get by on my own.”

“The thing is, you don’t have to.” _I promised her, but I’d be here anyway._ “I’m with you ‘til the end of the line, pal.”

 

+++++

 

Bucky likes taking girls dancing. He’s a charmer, throwing manufactured smiles at lovely dames, and they trip over their dainty shoes trying to get to him. He takes a different girl out each evening and gets drunk on the scent of perfume. He thinks maybe if he kisses enough girls, he can make his way back to that black-and-white world, that time before Steve when he couldn't see the blue in the sky. The colors whisper to him when he wants to forget who he fell in love with. Bucky drowns himself in the taste of lipstick (so unlike Steve, who would taste of sunshine and blood and everything good in the world), and he thinks that maybe, if he pretends not to love Steve, then he won’t. He wants to dance in black-and-white, just like the movies, and see shades of gray where he should be seeing colors, but Bucky’s learned that most people don’t get what they want.

 

+++++

 

Bucky comes home late at night stinking of booze and perfume, and Steve hates it. It’s just a reminder of the staccato beat that plays on repeat in his head, _he’s-not-yours, he’s-not-yours_. And then there’s the lipstick. Steve could list all the shades of red and pink that Bucky’s been covered with: crimson (blood), rose (his rare blush), cardinal (lipstick), fuchsia (lipstick)…The list goes on, and Steve knows every color, another painful reminder of the things he can never have ( _he’s-not-yours, he’s-not-yours_ ). But he’s a goddamn artist after all, so he paints, in blacks and white and grays, dreaming of the colors he’s not supposed to see. He drowns in them, in sensuous reds and soulful blues, but he still can’t fucking escape those too-bright eyes and kissable lips.

Bucky teases him about how he never dates.

“Seriously, Stevie,” he says, flinging his arm casually around Steve’s shoulder. “Why would you just wait for your soulmate? You could hate her, for all you know.”

Steve grins humorlessly, and all he can see is Bucky marrying a faceless girl sometime in the future, Bucky being happy, and him being alone.

He rolls his eyes. “It’s about having faith, Buck. My soulmate’s out there,” _(or right here)_ “and I don’t just want to neck around with every dame I see, like you do.”

Bucky shrugs. “I don’t see the point. Sure, my soulmate’s probably swell, but there’s a hell of a lot of beautiful dames out there. Why not take advantage of that?” He smiles and leans into Steve, oozing charisma and that god-awful cologne. “Hey, we should double-date. It’s no good for you to sit at home with your sketchbook and all, punk.”

“Jerk,” Steve shoots back, automatically, but Bucky asked, and wherever Bucky goes, he is doomed to follow.

 

+++++

 

It’s mostly the same. They go dancing. Bucky disappears somewhere with his girl of the week and comes home with a smug lipstick-smeared grin, and Steve complains about the smell (but he never mentions how he keeps trying to tape his heart back together). They’re best friends, and they dance their way through the streets of Brooklyn. Then the war begins, and Bucky gets drafted.

He burns the letter the moment he gets it. He screams, punching walls and bruising his knuckles as he watches his future burn. He’s not like Steve. He doesn’t crave the fight; he doesn’t want to go save the goddamn world. Hell, he’d be fine if the whole country burned, as long as Steve Rogers escaped intact. And he thinks that that’s the difference between him and Steve. Steve is a good person, he’s so damn good, and Bucky loves him for it. But Bucky? Sure, he cares about his country, but Steve means a hell of a lot more.

And he doesn’t want to leave his best friend in the middle of winter, when he could get sick, when he could die with Bucky miles and miles away. Steve can start a fight in an empty room, and he just keeps getting up after every hit. He gets up, when he’s bruised and bloody and wheezing for breath. He gets up when his bones are broken and his skin purple (and Bucky can see every hue on his skin, _why can’t it just be in tones of gray?_ ). And if Bucky’s shipped off to war, who’s going to finish those fights? Who’s going to be there for him if Bucky isn’t? Who’s going to be there when Steve wakes up coughing blood in the middle of the night?

Bucky is selfish, so help him. He’s wished, he’s prayed so many times to stop loving Steve, but it’s not something he could ever give up. But a soulmate isn’t just someone you fall in love with. Steve is his everything; his family, his life, his hopes, his colors. And Bucky couldn’t bear to ever lose that. So he does what he has to. He puts a smile on his face and swaggers up to his best friend. “I enlisted,” he lies, and he doesn’t hear Steve’s heart break as Bucky goes where he can’t follow. And Steve doesn’t hear the undertones swirling beneath his words. _I’ll miss you. I love you. I’d do anything to get back to you._

 

+++++

 

Steve stands in a line and gets kicked out of an enlistment booth, with all those healthy, “able-bodied” fellas laughing at his back as he storms away.

_“I’d bet a good gust of wind could knock him over.”_

_“What the hell is that shrimp even doing here?”_

But Steve never has been the type to back down from a challenge. The next time he says he’s Steve from Paramus, and he ends up in a back alley being beaten to a pulp after some guy makes a smart comment that he doesn’t know how to ignore. And then there are arms pulling the man away and it’s just like old times because it’s Bucky (who else would it be?). And he’s wearing his brand new _green_ uniform and the same old I’m-disappointed-in-you frown. But it’s Bucky’s last night before being shipped off to war and Steve can’t argue with him right now.

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Bucky shakes his head. “You’re about to be the last eligible man in New York. You know, there’s three and a half million women here? Hell, you could even find your soulmate for all you know.” He smiles (Steve doesn’t notice how his mouth is a little pinched at the edges and his eyebrows are too furrowed for that smile to be real)

“Well I’d settle for just one,” And then they both think, _I’d settle for just you._ But that isn't right, because it was never about settling. They think of colors that they’re not supposed to see. Steve thinks of brown hair and pink lips and all those shades of red, and Bucky’s thinking of blue eyes and blond hair and purple bruises, and they _ache_ for the empty spaces they can't fill.

Bucky drags Steve out on one more double date that night.

“Come on, Stevie, I heard Stark’s going to be there. He’s supposed to have a flying car.” He keeps his eyes bright and smirk lopsided, straightening his tie.

The girl Bucky’s set Steve up with loses interest in him quickly. He’s too skinny, with too many frown lines on his face. He doesn’t seem to know how to smile, and stares too much at the enlistment ads.

“Come on. You’re kind of missing the point of a double date.” Bucky tries to pull Steve away from the closest enlistment booth. They argue (again). Bucky thinks it’s an awful idea. They’ll either catch Steve for lying on his enlistment form, or they’ll actually take him (and either way, Bucky could lose him).

“What do you want me to do? Collect scrap metal in my little red wagon?” Steve’s voice drips with sarcasm.

Bucky tries not to flinch at the word  _red_. It sounds like Steve is trying to hit him where it hurts.  _He can't see red because he's not yours._ He lets out a breath. “Yes. Why not?” _At least you’ll be safe. I promised your mother I’d look after you and I’m not letting her down. I’m not letting_ you _down._ His words hang unsaid in the air between them. They argue awhile longer.

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.”

“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.” Steve grins, but he’s breaking, breaking, breaking. He’s always known that Bucky is going to lose him someday, that he’s going to die too soon (from a well placed punch or a burning fever). But he’s never counted on losing Bucky. Because he’s always promised to be right by his side, but he’s going away. Now the only thing Steve can do is follow him. He makes his way to the enlistment office. “Be careful.” He calls over his shoulder. “Don’t win the war ‘til I get there!” Bucky smiles at him, steering the pair of girls they’d brought toward the dance hall.

Steve doesn’t see Bucky turn and stop, hands in his pockets, to watch him walk away in his too-large suit. _You’d better still be here when I get back._ Bucky does something he hasn’t done in a long time. He prays.

 

+++++

 

The war isn’t like home. It’s harsh landscapes instead of familiar streets. Bullet wounds replace split knuckles and bruises. And it’s different because there’s no Steve-and-Bucky, no wisp of a punk watching his back. No blonde idiot who looked like he could be Bucky’s shadow (but anyone who knew the pair of them understood that it was the other way around). The 107th is friendly enough, they become like a group of brothers. That’s what happens when you see too many horrible things to stomach alone. But he deals with it. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and his trademark smile and everything seems kinda-sorta okay. But Bucky can deal with okay.

They interrogate him about his life, shoulders knocking together as they huddle around the fire.

“You got a girl back home?” Dugan asks, pulling a wink out of his ridiculous moustache.

“Nah, haven’t found the right one. I want to be able to see the color of her lipstick before I kiss her, you know?” Bucky grins at the white lie, thinking of that boy from long ago with that bloody nose (so red, so fucking red) and a bruise blooming on each cheek like a messed up blush.

“Oh, so you’re one of those types,” Gabe Jones chuckles, before regaling them all with tales of his Georgia hometown that has them bent over and wheezing in laughter. Bucky watches the firelight dance on his friends’ faces, and thinks maybe, just maybe, everything will turn out just fine.

 

+++++

 

 _Don’t do anything stupid until I get back_.

Steve laughs, Bucky’s words echoing in his head. What he’s doing now is beyond stupid. He’s in a strange machine, made by _Howard Stark_ (yes, the Howard Stark who crashed his flying car so spectacularly), and he’s pretty sure that if Bucky could see him now, he’d be yelling (but then again, Bucky does a lot of yelling). And then there’s pain, liquid fire burning through his veins and scorching his skin. And there’s a strange noise too, is someone screaming? It takes him too long to realize that it’s him. His bones are twisting and his muscles swell and he thinks his skin is tearing and stretching to accommodate this new being that isn't him. The machine opens, and Steve thinks that he’s died and been remade. He’s taller, muscular. He’s healthy, and he thinks that everything that makes him Steve Rogers has been stuffed into a brand new body. He wonders if his face is even the same, or if that’s gone too, warped beyond repair to become the super soldier the government has always wanted.

There’s an explosion, and a man screaming “Hail Hydra,” and somehow, Steve ends up in a ridiculous uniform on stage after stage, pretending to punch a man dressed as Hitler over and over again. He doesn’t know how he ended up here, standing in front of tired soldiers who couldn’t care less whether he’s the Star Spangled Man with a Plan. He’s a dancing monkey in tights, reduced to stealing moments in the rain to clear his head.

“You were meant for more than this, you know.”

Peggy Carter is sitting beside him, a half-smile playing on her deep red lips. Peggy is beautiful, she is concentrated willpower locked in bones of iron. She would not break if she were in his place. _What the hell happened to that scrawny kid from Brooklyn who couldn’t back down from a fight?_ Bucky’s voice is ringing in his head, and he forgets Peggy for a second. Steve forgets the _almost_ that lingers between them, that kinship of being the punching bag that always gets back up. He thinks of the men standing by the stage, with their stone-carved faces and crumbling frowns. “They look like they’ve been through hell.”

Peggy sighs. “These men more than most. Schmidt sent out a force to Azzano. Two hundred men went up against him, and less than fifty returned. Your audience contained what was left of the 107th. The rest were killed or captured.”

Steve can see it now, in his mind. No curtains or chorus girls in spangly dresses dancing around behind him. Just the field. Men being gunned down around him, falling into the mud. The 107th. _The 107 th. _Bucky _._ Steve has heard stories, of men killed in war, of their wives crying in the streets because they couldn’t see the blue in the sky. He’s wondered if that’s what happened to his mother. But Steve’s not giving up on his color. He’ll walk to Austria if that’s what it takes.

 _You’re not getting away from me, Bucky. Not this time_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages ago, and just found it in my documents while aggressively not writing a history paper that I really should have been writing. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was not nearly as bad as I remembered it to be. So I guess that's it....I was thinking of expanding on it a little more with the same writing style, going into some other canon events, including Steve's year with the howling commandoes and his experience as an avenger/meeting the winter soldier. Also I'm really mad that they never ended up kissing? So I might have to add that in at some point.


End file.
